मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

place. As if to checkmate this fictitious move, Mr., Barrie planted a fully armed posse of soldiers on a platform in the centre of our prison. This was in addition to the regiment of British soldiers specially detailed to be on patrolling duty all over the prison. This order continued for many months after the cessation of the war in Europe. After the incident of the Emden, I was subjected to the strictest surveillance. And that gave the traitors among us a chance to raise all sorts of rumours against me, and to convey them to the jailor and the Superintendent above him. They were busy propitiating these tin-gods in any manner they liked.

When a regiment of British soldiers came to be planted in the island, this mood of our friends had found a special outlet to vent itself against us. The Tommies had no means of amusement and recreation in the barren and sordid atmosphere of this prison. Our friends were kind enough to furnish the entertainment. They invented all sorts of stories about me and about my former revolutionary activities; about my machinations in this prison; and about my secret connections with Germany. Full of fervour and -spice they told the stories to the soldiers in order to entertain them. What those stories were, how the soldiers were regaled by them, what the officers said about me in their serious discussions over the possible movements of the Emden,—full of the real and imaginary in them—all this finds its proper place in what the famous "Ditcher" of the 'Capital' of Calcutta wrote of these events later on in his weekly notes for that paper. I may mention more about it as I pass on.

It was not so easy there to control us, and especially the political prisoners! The officers and the authorities must have imagined that our transportation to the jail in the Andamans was our death-in-life, the end of all our activities, our burial in the grave-yard of the Andamans from which no resurrection was possible. And, therefore, they need no more think of us and be anxious over us. But the world had not forgotten though we lay buried here. On the other hand, they thought and spoke and wrote about the Andamans in the world without, because of the political prisoners confined in that island. And the jail had been turned into a living fortress, strongly armed and keenly guarded, and the seas were protected by dreadnoughts and submarines, for fear of our escape from it, in order to keep us safe within.

That our compatriots in India should so remember us, so cherish our memory, when we lay as prisoners in the Andamans and dead to the world without, filled our hearts with gratitude to them. And even in that dark dungeon of a prison-house, in the conditions of utter despair and horrid physical and mental torture, this living memory about us gave us hope and courage which I feel it my duty to record in these pages. Every day we were in fear that a fresh charge of sedition and high treason might be trumped up against us as the result of a systematic campaign of misrepresentation going on against us during these days of war. And who misrepresented us and carried tales against us? Our own men, the renegades among us, who had allied themselves with Mr. Barrie to save their own skins!